"La principal virtud de la democracia es que deja obsoleta la revolución"
"La revolución consiste en imponer tu fantasía política a todos los demás"
"Los científicos deberían ir a donde les lleve su ciencia, no sus ideas políticas"
"Pensar suele reducirse a inventar razones para dudar de lo evidente"
"No es una de las dos Españas la que nos hiela el corazón, sino la atroz semejanza entre quienes creen que hay dos"
BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraqi anti-government protesters tore down walls and poured into the capital's heavily-fortified Green Zone on Saturday, where they stormed parliament in a major escalation of a monthslong political crisis.
Supporters of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have been holding demonstrations and sit-ins for months to demand an overhaul of Iraq's corrupt and ineffective political system, but Saturday was the first time they broke into the Green Zone, home to most government ministries and foreign embassies.
Iraqi security forces fired tear gas at one entrance of the zone but appeared to be largely standing down as protesters marched through the area, chanting and waving Iraqi flags. Hundreds were still pouring into the Green Zone as night fell.
BREITBART NEWS.- In 2016, Clinton has received 12,437,734 votes so far. In the states that have already voted this cycle, when she ran and lost back in 2008, Clinton received 12,727,221 votes.
Specifically, the data shows, Clinton has seen a decline of 273,321 votes from 2008 to 2016 among states that have already voted this cycle. That 2.15 percent decrease nationally is exacerbated in several key states that Clinton would need to win to secure the presidency in a general election, suggesting that she’s extraordinarily weak on the electoral college scale nationally—and that whoever wins the GOP nomination will likely be able to thump her in the general in November.
This year, Clinton has seen declines versus her own 2008 vote totals in the following states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Washington State, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Wyoming, and Alaska.
FRANCE BLEU.- Le tribunal de grande instance de Perpignan a refusé de dissoudre le comité pour l'auto-détermination de la Catalogne-Nord en se déclarant incompétent. C'est la préfecture qui avait saisi la justice en 2014 pour empêcher la tenue d'un référendum privé sur l'indépendance des Pyrénées-Orientales.
C'est une victoire pour les catalanistes. La préfète des Pyrénées-orientales avait saisi en 2014 la justice pour obtenir la dissolution d'une association qui voulait organiser un référendum local sur l'indépendance, mais ce jeudi, le tribunal de grande instance de Perpignan a refusé de dissoudre l'association en se déclarant incompétent.
Dans ses conclusions, le tribunal a estimé que la consultation qui devait être organisée est une manifestation de la liberté d'expression et que le comité n'appelle pas au démantèlement du pouvoir républicain.
L'État français, partie perdante qui avait invoqué l'intégrité du territoire, a été condamné à payer la somme de 1500 euros correspondant aux frais de justice. S'il veut poursuivre la procédure, le dossier devra maintenant être inscrit à l'ordre du jour du conseil des ministres, en vue d'une dissolution de l'association.
D'ici là, le comité pour l'auto-détermination de la Catalogne-Nord a la possibilité d'organiser son référendum privé à tout instant et son président ne cache pas ses intentions. La date n'est pas encore choisie, mais Robert Casanova souhaite organiser le vote au même moment qu'en Catalogne-Sud où un nouveau référendum pourrait se tenir d'ici début 2017.
Le comité pour l'auto-détermination de la Catalogne-Nord assure avoir bouclé son budget de 300 000 euros avec des dons attendus de Catalogne-Sud et d'Ecosse.
Las sequías no están empeorando y no están causando guerras
CLIMATE RESEARCH.- Claims that droughts are getting worse are not supported in the scientific literature. This is true for both on a global level and for the UK, where historical records indicate much longer and more severe droughts occurred long before human carbon dioxide emissions became significant.
Moreover, claims that “climate change” was behind the conflicts in Darfur and Syria are shown to be based on highly partisan scientific studies that ignore a host of conflicting evidence.
Andrew Montford, the author of the paper said:
“Records of drought provide very little support for the idea that dry places are getting drier and this is true both of the UK and the world as a whole. Still, green activists are never going to spurn the opportunity to exploit every failure of the rains by blaming it on climate change.”
“Droughts are bad news for those who have to endure them. But for politicians to indulge environmentalists’ wild claims is dishonest.”
La actividad volcánica explica mejor el cambio climático que el CO2
NoTricksZone.- ...Anthropogenic CO2 emissions were flat and low (~1 GtC [gigatons carbon] per year) during the 1915 to 1945 warming period, and they rose dramatically (up to ~5 GtC per year) between the 1940s and 1970s. This means that as CO2 emissions increased significantly, surface temperatures cooled significantly (1940s to 1970s) – the opposite of what should have been occurring if rising CO2 emissions are largely responsible for global warming.
A more recent depiction of large-scale volcanic eruptions for the last 1,500 years comes from a new paper (Liu et al., 2016) linking global-scale precipitation patterns (monsoons) to large volcanic eruptions. Notice that the dramatic post-Medieval Warm Period centennial-scale ocean cooling described above (Rosenthal et al., 2013, Ocean2k) corresponds closely with frequent clusters of volcanic eruptions. Also, notice how volcanically quiescent the last 80 years of the 20th century have been, which has, on net, allowed more solar radiation to heat the oceans and contribute to global warming.
Las eurpciones volcánicas facilitaron el desarrollo del imperio romano
NEW SCIENTIST.- You won’t find it in history textbooks, but the Roman Empire’s rise to dominance in Egypt and the Middle East may have been influenced by a series of volcanic eruptions that reduced rainfall.
These eruptions could have contributed to the sabotage and destruction of the Ptolemaic Kingdom on the Nile, paving the way for the rise of Cleopatra and the Roman Empire – and, ultimately, the modern Western world.
The Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled Egypt and North Africa in the final three centuries BC, known as the Hellenistic period. Now, teamwork between volcanologists and historians has revealed a close match in timing between volcanic eruptions and domestic unrest, revolts and uprisings that led to the kingdom’s downfall.
Hallan documentos que probarían que el ISIS vende petróleo a Turquía a cambio de armas
RT.- Diez días después de la liberación de la ciudad de Shaddadi en el Kurdistán sirio RT Documental encontró documentos que mostraban una relación directa entre los combatientes de Turquía y los de Estado islámico que operan en Siria. El papeleo yihadista incluye un montón de pasaportes extranjeros con sellos de entrada de Turquía y folletos llamando a la yihad contra el gobierno sirio, impresos en Turquía.
Pero lo más importante, entre las pilas de documentos encontraron montones de facturas detalladas utilizadas por los terroristas para calcular y reportar sus ingresos diarios de tráfico clandestino.
"Por supuesto, no recibirían ningún tipo de armas de Turquía si no les enviaban petróleo", asegura un trabajador de la refinería de petróleo a RT. "Ellos... iban con el petróelo y volvían con las armas de fuego. Y así, íban y volvían, íban y volvian".
En Francia mueren dos niños cada día por maltratos
LE MONDE.- En France, deux enfants meurent chaque jour de maltraitances infligées par leurs parents et 45 % des Français soupçonnent un cas dans leur entourage, selon un sondage réalisé en 2015 par l’association l’Enfant bleu. Et si, pour beaucoup, donner une fessée n’équivaut pas à frapper son enfant, selon un rapport de l’Unicef de 2003, il existe un « risque que la punition physique débouche rapidement sur des formes plus graves de violence ». En effet, la limite entre « punition raisonnable » et maltraitance est variable.
Une interdiction est nécessaire pour faire évoluer les mentalités, selon Mme Dumonteil-Kremer qui note que « la plupart des parents estiment que la fessée n’est pas taper ». « Mais pour la plupart des parents, c’est très difficile, estime-t-elle. Beaucoup sont remontés contre cette loi parce qu’ils sont démunis et se sentent menacés. Ils ne savent pas comment faire autrement. » Il s’agit donc aussi de faire un travail de formation et d’information quant à des solutions, pas uniquement d’interdire.
Le Défenseur des droits, Jacques Toubon, est du même avis. Dans son rapport remis en février au comité des droits de l’enfant de l’ONU, il note que de nombreux parents perçoivent encore la fessée et la gifle comme « un moyen éducatif ». Il recommande que l’interdiction des châtiments corporels soit « inscrite dans la loi » et préconise « des actions pédagogiques pour sensibiliser le public à une éducation sans violence ».
PACIFIC STANDARD.- Chances are, you probably think your mind works pretty well. It might lead you astray now and then, but usually it helps you make good decisions and remember things reliably. At the very least, you’re probably confident that it doesn’t change depending on the time of day or what you had to eat.
But you’d be wrong. Our brains fool us all the time. And we typically have no idea that it’s happening.
Let’s look at some of the wacky things our minds make us think and do. And then we’ll examine how graphics, including charts, interactives, and other visual tools, can help show us our mind’s shortcomings. LENA GROEGER
Neurociencia y magia. Definitivamente, nuestro cerebro nos engaña
La magia interesa a la Neurociencia, al menos por dos cuestiones relacionadas con la atención y la memoria. Es por eso que algunos investigadores –como estos del instituto Barrow- se han interesado por los trucos ilusionistas de los magos y de ellos han extraído algunos hechos que interesan a la Neurociencia.
Probablemente todo procede de un hecho fundamental: el aluvión de estímulos que recibimos por cada fracción de tiempo es tan intenso que necesitaríamos un cerebro del tamaño de un edificio para poder computar a todos ellos. Es por eso que nuestro cerebro opera a través del descarte. desdeñamos aquellos estímulos que no son importantes y nos dedicamos a dirigir nuestra atención a aquellos que nos parecen relevantes. Este hecho junto con algunos otros que proceden de nuestra memoria: como los recuerdos falsos o la confabulación, contribuyen hacer la tarea más fácil para los ilusionistas.
REASON.COM.- Bernie Sanders thinks the U.S. should look to Sweden and other Scandinavian countries to "learn what they have accomplished for their working people." The Vermont senator has said so repeatedly throughout his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, prompting GOP rival Marco Rubio to say, "I think Bernie Sanders is a good candidate for president—of Sweden."
As a native of Sweden, I must admit this makes me Feel the Bern a bit. Sanders is right: America would benefit hugely from modeling her economic and social policies after her Scandinavian sisters. But Sanders should be careful what he wishes for. When he asks for "trade policies that work for the working families of our nation and not just the CEOs of large, multi-national corporations," Social Democrats in Sweden would take this to mean trade liberalization—which would have the benefit of exposing monopolist fat cats to competition—not the protectionism that Sanders favors.
In fact, when President Barack Obama visited Sweden in 2013, the three big Swedish trade unions sent him a letter requesting a meeting. Their agenda: a discussion of "how to promote free trade." The chairman of the largest Social Democratic trade union scolded the American president for his insufficient commitment to the free flow of goods.
This reality will not endear my home country to American socialists, but it's better to be hated for the right reasons than to be loved for the wrong ones, as the saying goes. Being more like modern Sweden actually means deregulation, free trade, a national school voucher system, partially privatized pensions, no property tax, no inheritance tax, and much lower corporate taxes. Sorry to burst your bubble, Bernie. JOHAN NORBERG
La civilización no es el punto final de la historia moderna, sino una sucesión de intervalos recurrentes en los espasmos de la barbarie
Civilization is not the endpoint of modern history, but a succession of interludes in recurring spasms of barbarism. The liberal civilization that has prevailed in some Western countries over the past few centuries emerged slowly and with difficulty against the background of a particular mix of traditions and institutions. Precarious wherever it has existed, it is a way of life that has no strong hold on humankind. For an older generation of liberal thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Isaiah Berlin, these were commonplaces. Today these truisms are forbidden truths, which can no longer be spoken or in many cases comprehended.
Liberal civilization is not the emerging meaning of the modern world but a historical singularity that is inherently fragile. This is why it is worth preserving. Defending this form of life against ISIS requires a clear perception that the jihadist group is not an atavistic force that—with a little assistance from intensified bombing—will fade away with advancing modernization. If the threat is to be removed, ISIS will have to be defeated and destroyed.
The simpleminded reasoning that rejects any Western military action on the grounds that earlier interventions were counterproductive fails to take the measure of the challenge that ISIS now poses. The Paris attacks, which appear to have been a response to defeats in the field, show that the state that ISIS has created cannot simply be contained. Nor would containment be enough in ethical terms, since ISIS has demonstrated a capacity for genocide. But the aim must not be to replace ISIS’s theocratic totalitarianism with a replica of liberal democracy—a delusional project that has unleashed the forces by which we are now besieged. A functioning state that enjoyed a reasonable measure of local support and could keep the peace would be a sufficiently challenging objective for Western policy. JOHN GRAY
"A los pocos minutos de haber acabado las elecciones todo el mundo en España celebró la muerte del bipartidismo. Pues bien, ahí está el bipartidismo, la venganza cobrada: el 26 de junio unas nuevas elecciones evaluarán la salud del bipartidismo y la de su modelo alternativo. Todos los medios subrayan el fracaso de la política y de los políticos. Y habría que precisar. Porque lo cierto es que la nueva política no ha sabido garantizar lo que la vieja ha dado durante décadas: gobierno y estabilidad.
(...)
La nueva política ha dado dos partidos incompatibles entre ellos e incompatibles con los demás. No es descartable que los ciudadanos quieran volver a respirar, a partir del 26 de junio, el viejo y conocido olor." / ARCADI ESPADA
TELEGRAPH.- The tins of smoked sprats, pickled herrings and mackerel in tomato sauce were a favourite staple of Soviet kitchens, as familiar as Heinz beans and Marmite in the West. But now the sprawling Brivais Vilnis cannery on the shores of the Gulf of Riga is facing hard times.
First the forklift truck drivers left for building sites in Ireland. Then the computer programmers headed to London, and the women who gut and thread the fish onto long needles for smoking departed for plants in Norway and Sweden.
While Britain weighs up leaving the EU because of a tide of migrant workers, for the little Baltic state of Latvia the long-sought dream of membership has come at a phenomenal price: the loss of hundreds of thousands of its educated young.
Now a grand national effort, likened by diplomats to Israel’s immigration programme, has been launched to lure the diaspora home and avert a demographic catastrophe.
“Last November, we were seeking 20 workers, and it was almost impossible to find them,” complains Arnolds Babris, the chairman.
The town of Salacgriva has shrunk by a quarter to 7,959 people in 15 years.
POLITICO.- Belgian police had information as early as mid-2014 that Paris attackers Salah and Brahim Abdeslam intended to carry out “an irreversible act,” according to a classified police watchdog’s report on the country’s response to the Paris attacks.
Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up in Paris last November during the attacks that killed 130 people, while Salah fled and was captured in Brussels last month, four days before the terror attacks in Brussels.
The conclusions of the report, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the brothers’ radicalization, links to Paris attacks mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and their intention to commit some sort of act were known to Belgian security forces well before the attacks.
The police’s anti-terror unit argued that it could not file a report on the brothers into the central police database because it could not be established with certainty which brother was involved.
But the watchdog questions that argument, saying the names of both Abdeslam brothers, who lived in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels, were already in the database.
The report highlights sloppiness by individuals, limited resources and a lack of procedural guidance for officials dealing with highly sensitive information.
This trend among our young people is very real, and you can see it in their support of Bernie Sanders. For millions upon millions of young adults in America today, Hillary Clinton is not nearly liberal enough for them. So they have flocked to Sanders, and if they had been the only ones voting in this election season, he would have won the Democratic nomination by a landslide.
THE WASHINGTON POST.- Cruz is clearly the stronger of the two candidates in a match-up against Clinton. While he trails her, it's by three points as opposed to the 8.5 point deficit for Trump. And, unlike Trump, Cruz actually has led Clinton in head-to-head polls -- albeit during a relatively brief period earlier this year.
Those polling charts, of course, capture the state of the race today -- a race that hasn't truly engaged in any meaningful way just yet
LE MONDE.- Apparus d’abord comme une alternative prometteuse au pétrole dans les transports, les biocarburants (ou agrocarburants) sont de plus en plus épinglés en raison de leurs effets pervers : déforestation, disparition de cultures vivrières, augmentation des prix des denrées alimentaires… mais aussi émissions de gaz à effet de serre.
Une étude de l’ONG européenne Transport & Environnement (T & E), publiée le 25 avril, estime ainsi que les biocarburants, loin d’être vertueux pour le climat, émettent en fait plus de gaz à effet de serre que les combustibles fossiles (essence ou diesel). L’association s’appuie sur une vaste étude commandée par la Commission européenne et publiée en mars, qui présente un nouveau bilan des impacts des agrocarburants, en termes d’émissions et de surfaces cultivées, à l’horizon 2020.
A cette date, en Europe, 5 % de biodiesel en moyenne sera incorporé dans 1 litre de diesel. Or, selon l’étude, 1 litre de biodiesel émet 80 % d’émissions de gaz à effet de serre de plus que 1 litre de diesel. Résultats : le biodiesel causera une hausse de 4 % des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) par rapport au scénario d’un diesel pur. Soit l’équivalent, selon T & E, de 12 millions de voitures supplémentaires sur les routes européennes.
El PIB es un mal indicador de bienestar material. Tiempo para un nuevo enfoque
THE ECONOMIST.- Measuring prosperity better requires three changes. The easiest is to improve GDP as a gauge of production. Junking it altogether is no answer: GDP’s enduring appeal is that it offers, or seems to, a summary statistic that tells people how well an economy is doing. Instead, statisticians should improve how GDP data are collected and presented. To minimise revisions, they should rely more on tax records, internet searches and other troves of contemporaneous statistics, such as credit-card transactions, than on the standard surveys of businesses or consumers. Private firms are already showing the way—scraping vast quantities of prices from e-commerce sites to produce improved inflation data, for example.
Second, services-dominated rich countries should start to pioneer a new, broader annual measure, that would aim to capture production and living standards more accurately. This new metric—call it GDP-plus—would begin with a long-overdue conceptual change: the inclusion in GDP of unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives. GDP-plus would also measure changes in the quality of services by, for instance, recognising increased longevity in estimates of health care’s output. It would also take greater account of the benefits of brand-new products and of increased choice. And, ideally, it would be sliced up to reflect the actual spending patterns of people at the top, middle and bottom of the earnings scale: poorer people tend to spend more on goods than on Harvard tuition fees.
AFP.- A Turkish court on Thursday sentenced two prominent Turkish journalists to two years behind bars for illustrating their columns with a controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, their lawyer said.
The sentence handed to the columnists for the opposition Cumhuriyet daily Hikmet Cetinkaya and Ceyda Karan -- which is still subject to appeal -- comes amid growing alarm over press freedoms in Turkey.
"The two journalists were sentenced to two years each in jail," said Bulent Utku, the lawyer of the pair. "But we will appeal the ruling at the appeals court," he told AFP.
Karan and Cetinkaya went on trial in January last year on charges of "inciting public hatred" and "insulting religious values" after illustrating their columns with the controversial cartoon.
THE TELEGRAPH.- Having lots of friends can be ‘better than morphine’, new research suggests.
Scientists at Oxford University found people with large groups of friends have a higher tolerance for pain.
Experts looked into endorphins - the body's natural pain killers.
The chemical is a ‘potent analgesic, indeed more so than the pain-relieving opiate drug morphine’, the authors write in the journal Scientific Reports.
EL ESPAÑOL.- En el caso de Lozano concurren razones personales. Quiere dedicarse a “proyectos profesionales”, pero lo cierto es que muy pocos la querían en el partido. Apenas hizo campaña electoral y en el Congreso su actividad ha sido más que discreta. Varios dirigentes le exigieron que pidera perdón por arremeter durante años contra el PSOE y muy pocos consideraban acertado que repitiese. Sánchez se equivocó una vez, según una opinión unánime en el partido, pero hacerlo dos veces sería demasiado grave.
Le acabo de comunicar a Pedro Sánchez mi decisión de no ir en las listas. Aquí lo explico: pic.twitter.com/eZ6soqSYMX
Chacón: “Hay motivos políticos para marcharme pero no son relevantes"
Chacón ha renunciado por “motivos políticos” que ella no ha querido especificar pero 'que no son relevantes'. 'Para mí me los quedo', dijo ante el pasmo de los periodistas, que esperaban que explicase el roto que le hace a su partido a menos de dos meses de las elecciones.
Fuentes del PSOE lamentan las malas artes de la aún diputada. En Ferraz se recuerda que “en ningún momento descartó presentarse a las primarias contra Pedro” Sánchez, que quedarán convocadas el sábado. “Estuvo durante mes y medio mareando la perdiz”, añaden desde la dirección socialista.
Otras fuentes aseguran que la única intención de Chacón es la de resituarse en el partido y desmarcarse de Sánchez con una ‘espantá’ que puede hacer que empeore su resultado. No en vano, Chacón estaba considerada como un buen cartel electoral, es conocida por los catalanes y tiene peso electoral. “Es su forma de decir que no está de acuerdo con Sánchez”, explica un socialista.
Más...
E-NOTICIES.- Societat Civil Catalana ha presentado al público, en un acto celebrado en la Feria de Abril de Catalunya, el documental titulado “Disidentes. El precio de la discrepancia en la Catalunya nacionalista”, dirigido por Fran Jurado y producido por la entidad.
El documental critica, entre otras cosas, la relación entre los medios de comunicación y el nacionalismo. (...) El socialista Joan Ferran señala en este sentido que “Pujol llamaba a determinados redactores para que hicieran determinadas noticias en diarios de gran tirada”. Ferran recuerda que “hay un informe pagado por el Govern donde estaba la ficha de la mayoría de los profesionales de TV3, desde el señor Francino al señor Alsius, desde la señora Barceló al señor Pellicer, en los que se miraba la dicción en catalán pero también su afinidad a la ideología nacionalista”.
El abogado belga de Salah Abdeslam, Sven María, explica la dificultad de garantizar la defensa de alguien al que considera un 'idiota'
LIBERATION.- Il ne cache d’ailleurs pas son mépris pour Abdeslam : «C’est un petit con de Molenbeek issu de la petite criminalité, plutôt un suiveur qu’un meneur. Il a l’intelligence d’un cendrier vide, il est d’une abyssale vacuité. Il est l’exemple parfait de la génération GTA [ Grand Theft Auto] qui croit vivre dans un jeu vidéo. Lui et ses copains ont réussi à rendre antipathique toute une religion. Je lui ai demandé s’il avait lu le Coran, ce que j’ai fait, et il m’a répondu qu’il avait lu son interprétation sur Internet. Pour des esprits simples, c’est parfait, le Net, c’est le maximum qu’ils puissent comprendre.»
LIBRE MERCADO.- 39,6%. Ése es el tax wedge de un trabajador soltero español que gane el equivalente al salario medio de nuestro país. Es decir, de lo que la empresa paga por tener a este español medio contratado, Hacienda se lleva casi el 40% antes de empezar a hablar. El reparto del palo fiscal al trabajo en España es el siguiente: 11,6% en impuestos directos (IRPF), 4,9% en Seguridad Social del empleado y 23,0% en Seguridad Social a cargo de la empresa. En total, 4 de cada diez euros que el trabajador nunca verá. Es un dato elevado que, además, destaca por tres motivos:
Es superior a la cifra que pagaba el español medio en el año 2000
Es casi cuatro puntos superior a la media de la OCDE (el club que agrupa a los países más ricos del planeta)
El neto que le queda a este empleado para sus gastos, una vez pagados estos impuestos, es bastante inferior a lo que le queda a los ciudadanos de otros países de la OCDE
BUSINESS INSIDER.- The "golden age" of stock market returns is over.
That's the summary of a big piece of research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), which estimated returns over the next 20 years in US and Western European markets under two scenarios. The first assumes that today's slow-growth environment remains, while the second models faster growth as technology improves.
It concluded that in neither case would returns match those of the past 30 years. For US and European stocks, the difference between past and future annual returns could range from 1.5 percentage points to 4 percentage points. The gap for fixed-income could be even wider, between 3 and 5 percentage points for most countries, the report notes.
"What's surprising is that even if there's higher GDP growth, we find that returns in equity and bonds over the next 20 years would still be lower," Susan Lund, a partner at the institute and one of the coauthors of the report, told Business Insider.
POLITICO.- Who really sways the room when European Union leaders meet behind the closed doors of a summit?
In the chart below, we’ve plotted which national leaders are effective at combining forces with their ambassadors to the EU, to ensure power and influence.
In this analysis of what one ambassador calls “the conveyer belt between Brussels and national capitals,” you can see the relative strength of a country’s leader and ambassador, where the country is ranked overall, and whether its trajectory in the matrix is positive, neutral or negative based on likely events in the coming months.
The starting premise is the increasing importance in recent years of leaders’ summits and the “Coreper” meetings of ambassadors who prepare those gatherings and keep diplomacy ticking between them, relative to other ministerial meetings.
Carlos Herrera y Federico Jiménez Losantos, moderados por Ana Rosa Quintana, protagonizaron este miércoles "Dos gallos que despiertan España", debate organizado por Unidad Editorial y el diario El Mundo y que se ha celebrado en el Espacio Bertelsmann. Al acto han acudido, entre otros, periodistas como David Jiménez, Arcadi Espada o Hermann Tertsch, o políticos como Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo y Pablo Casado.
Quintana, que sólo fue "a moderar", arrancó preguntándole a Jiménez Losantos por su pasado maoísta. "En España –respondió el director de Es la mañana de Federico, de esRadio– no había más que el Movimiento, que estaba parado, y el Partido, que estaba partido. Tengo sesenta años y eso me lo están recordando toda la vida". "El PCE que yo conocí –añadió– y su gente eran extraordinarios. No se parece nada a la basura comunista de ahora".
The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest. America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The consequence of this is that remembrance as a species of morality has become one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. Today, most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations.
But what if this is wrong, if not always, then at least part of the time? What if collective historical memory, as it is actually employed by communities and nations, has led far too often to war rather than peace, to rancour and resentment rather than reconciliation, and the determination to exact revenge for injuries both real and imagined, rather than to commit to the hard work of forgiveness? / David Rieff is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. He has published numerous articles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, El Pais, The New Republic, World Affairs, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and other publications
When I started taking Women’s Studies classes 4 years ago, I was seduced by feminist ideology. Mentally tabulating my oppression cards became a hobby. Unfortunately, being steeped in feminism didn’t just make me blind to the truth about men—it made me actively resist learning about it.
Thankfully, while feminism taught me that women were on the losing side of everything—real life taught me that disadvantage is more nuanced than that.
Men are 4 times more likely to die by suicide. As schizophrenia is arguably one of the worst mental illnesses, men are also 2-3x more likely to fall ill to it. Research tends to concur that men are anywhere from 2-15x more likely to have autism. Men also are also twice as likely to develop alcohol addiction, which is a debilitating and destructive disease that has ramifications for everyone, including women and children.
Men, especially men of color, also tend to face prison at higher rates than women. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, men constitute 93% of those locked up. Men also receive 63% longer prison sentences for comparable crimes.
Many people also say that “men are at The Top.” While it is true that many of the most powerful people are men, we must also recognize that men predominate at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder too. 62% of the homeless population is male. Men are also 9x more likely to die homeless. In my experience living in NYC, homeless males outnumber females sleeping on the streets by at least 10:1, sometimes by much more. Unfortunately, neither men’s issues nor homelessness are glamorous activist domains.
Additionally, 85% of black homicide victims are male. The last time I brought this up in a conversation, a white feminist scoffed and said “well that’s their fault,” which implied that victims of gang violence somehow deserved it. That’s similar to the victim-blaming we see with reference to rape. When men lose out, women lose out too. Many of these men are fathers, husbands, and sons. The tear in the social fabric when a community loses a man to gun violence or incarceration has devastating reverberations throughout everyone else’s life. /Toni Airaksinen is a sophomore student at Barnard College. She is a columnist for The Columbia Daily Spectator and she tweets @Toni_Airaksinen
En un estudio realizado en la Universidad de Minnesota, publicado en 2004, se examinó la presencia de coliformes fecales en muestras de frutas y verduras de explotaciones ecológicas y convencionales, detectándose dichos microorganismos en el 9,7% de las del primer tipo y en un 1,6% de las del segundo. El producto más contaminado por Escherichia coli y sus parientes fue la lechuga ecológica (22%). La mayor presencia de coliformes en los productos ecológicos se debe al uso de estiércol fresco, cuyo uso es permitido por la complaciente normativa, al estipular únicamente que el estiércol sea «preferentemente compostado». El estiércol de todas las vacas, ecológicas o no, tiene microorganismos fecales, incluida la cepa letal de Escherichia coli O157:H7, si se usa antes del año, y en la agricultura ecológica se usa hasta fresco de tres días y casi siempre antes del año. La probabilidad de infección por la mencionada cepa patógena es ocho veces mayor a través de los productos ecológicos que de los convencionales. En 1997 fue responsable de veintiuna muertes en Lancashire y en 2006 protagonizó un incidente, mediado por espinacas ecológicas producidas en California, que afectó a unas doscientas personas y causó tres muertes y varios fallos renales irreversibles. | Francisco García Olmedo y Jaime Costa en Revista de Libros
The number of EU migrants living in the UK has been undercounted by 250,000 over the past five years, an explosive report claims today.
The study said net migration from inside the EU was around 50,000 a year higher than official statistics admit.
Crucially, it would mean that migration from inside the EU – over which the Government has no control - is now higher than that from the rest of the world combined.
El presidente del Parlamento de Turquía, Ismail Kahraman, dijo que al ser Turquía mayoritariamente musulmana necesita una constitución religiosa, una propuesta que contradice los principios fundadores de la moderna república turca fundada por Atatürk. Más tarde dijo que sus comentarios eran simples "opiniones personales" y que la nueva Constitución debe garantizar la libertad religiosa
GUARDIAN.- “Elaborina came out of my research into edible paper,” he explains. “I was looking for a flour that would allow me to give paper a scent and a taste. We came up with the flour from meals like Spanish omelette or roast lamb. We then discovered that not only did the product have the flavours of the original dish, but also its nutritional qualities as well.”
As an example he presents me with a selection of different bizcochos, made from roasted peppers, Spanish omelette, as well as the bean stew. The differences between them are subtle. At first they all blend into one, unexpectedly savoury, softly crumbling cake. A “churro”, a crunchy, fried dough that he makes from an elaborina of caramelised onion, is much easier to identify. Yet he says that his patients, with their senses sharpened by having been on a bland diet for so long, were able to identify the flavours in 70% of the cases. I wonder, though, whether a bizcocho of Spanish omelette is really so much easier to eat than a Spanish omelette?
“An omelette might not be difficult for you or I but for people with problems chewing or swallowing it is,” he says. “Elaborina can also just be mixed with water as a paste. Those kind of soft, liquid based diets tend to have very limited flavours. Everybody just makes strawberry, chocolate or vanilla. As though there were no other flavours in the world!”
Se trata de un enfoque que indica una verdadera revolución para las terapias antivirales en cuanto fueron desarrolladas moléculas que en lugar de atacar a los clásicos componentes virales, como sucede con los fármacos actuales, inhiben una proteína humana, la RNA helicasas DDX3, que los virus utilizan para infectar la célula y replicarse.
ECD.-Albert Rivera ya prepara un Gobierno con el PP tras las elecciones del próximo 26 de junio. El líder de Ciudadanos maneja el nombre de posibles ministros, aunque prefiere guardar silencio para no precipitar los acontecimientos. Uno de los elegidos es Luis Garicano.
Podemos y C's rechazan el intento final del PSOE de investir a Sánchez
Albert Rivera no ha querido ni valorar las propuestas de PSOE y Compromís para formar gobierno y Pablo Iglesias ha lamentado que Pedro Sánchez haya «vuelto a decir no» a un ejecutivo de coalición «a la valenciana». Así han rechazado los dos partidos señalados por el PSOE el último intento por formar gobierno, después de que Compromís planteara un acuerdo de mínimos para salir del bloqueo.
SP!KE.- It seems that no discussion of sex and relationships can take place nowadays without the issue of consent dominating. Yet the understanding of consent as a process of explicitly requesting and granting permission prior to engaging in sex is a recent and worrying development. It suggests that formal rules should dictate private relationships and that passion and spontaneity should be jettisoned in favour of sticking to a rote-learnt script. As such, the particular focus on verbally given and repeated consent sets an unrealistic standard for most sexual relationships. It encourages the perception that sex that is not preceded by formal negotiations is rape. Rape becomes redefined as sex that was unwanted and regretted, even if this was not communicated at the time. The preoccupation with formal consent has been driven by feminist campaigners and it reflects their contempt for ordinary people / Joanna Williams is education editor at spiked. Her new book, Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge, is published by Palgrave Macmillan UK
